USPS voting rule ‘would be chaos’ if implemented this close to election, blue states warn Supreme Court

Allowing the U.S. Postal Service to implement a new rule restricting mail voting at this stage “would be chaos,” Democratic attorneys general told the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

“Whatever else may be said of USPS’ new rule, it would wreak havoc on States and their voters if it takes effect at this late point – when some States, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, have already begun to mail out ballots,” the officials wrote as they urged the justices to reject the Trump administration’s appeal of a lower court block on the measure.

“This Court has repeatedly refused to allow far less disruptive changes to take effect on ‘the eve of an election,’” they added.

With Election Day just 55 days away, the Justice Department is rushing to put the president’s attack on mail voting into effect after U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction on Sept. 4. barring the mail agency from moving forward.

Talwani said the administration’s plan is likely unconstitutional and threatens to disenfranchise millions of Americans who seek to vote by mail. One-third of the electorate, or 47 million people, cast their ballots by mail in 2024.

The Democratic attorneys general echoed that argument in Wednesday’s brief.

“USPS’ unprecedented experiment with our Nation’s most cherished franchise – the right to vote – is unlawful,” the officials wrote.

“Never before has USPS attempted to interfere with elections in this way, let alone a fast-approaching election,” they added. “And nothing in federal law authorizes USPS to refuse to deliver ballots. To the contrary, Congress has exhaustively enumerated the types of materials that USPS can lawfully refuse to deliver. Ballots are not among them.”

U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer pushed back on Talwani’s order in the administration’s application to the Supreme Court asking them to lift her block.

“Contrary to the claims of the district court and respondents that the Postal Service is trying to federalize the rules for mail-in voting, the Postal Service’s final rule imposes only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail,” Sauer said.

“The Rule thus plainly does not seize control of States’ administration of elections – it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail,” Sauer added.

The Postal Service rule requires states to use envelopes with unique barcodes for tracking, and have those designs approved by the Postal Service ahead of time. It also demands states hand over lists of voter data, including names and addresses, for those who intend to vote by mail. The Postal Service said it would not deliver ballots in states that don’t comply.

But a key aspect of the Postal Service plan, the federal government portal where states would upload voter information, hasn’t gone live.

Last week, an anonymous whistleblower said the portal’s development was rushed and seriously flawed, leaving the possibility that tens of thousands of ballots could be rejected due to a single error.

In an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, the legal group representing the whistleblower urged the justices to keep Talwani’s freeze on Trump’s order in place in light of the whistleblower’s disclosure to Congress.

“The Disclosure shows what the Rule does as built,” the legal aid group wrote. “It places two federal checkpoints between a State’s ballots and its voters, applies a zero-tolerance standard at the second, and will reject an entire mailing—tens of thousands of ballots—if a single sampled envelope fails to scan. Nothing in the Postal Service’s practice, and nothing in the Government’s analogies to cremated remains, replica explosives, or postage, works that way. An agency that can unilaterally block mail-in voting for thousands of indisputably legal voters is regulating the manner of an election, a power the Constitution assigns to the States and Congress and that Congress has never delegated to the Postal Service.”